To follow up on the recent drama: Things settled down a little bit. A few things came together and while we’ll still without a home, we’re not without a move-in date. That said, a quick weekend trip to Maine was in order. To decompress before the final act and get some other family business attended to.
We’re not out of the woods yet. But at least we’re on that path.
At the moment, A. and I are (for all practical purposes) homeless.
We met a guy (Eric) last night who believe that it will make a funny story in about five years or so. Good lord do I hope he is right. Anyway, at the moment we’re scrambling to make sense of the miscommunications that have gotten us to this stage and are both troubled by the ironic turns that got us here. That said, there doesn’t appear to be a reasonable end in sight.
Wish us luck.
There’s a large body of folks from the community gathered in a central location. It’s like a pub where everyone gathers to watch the news and other entertainment. (Imagine an alternate history where people understood sharing and valued community gathering; the resulting present is this place where community’s are designed to be easily navigable by foot and everyone gets together centrally for eating, story-telling, and the news.) Featured on the program tonight, the commentator is giving Tom Cruise an opportunity to respond to some recent allegations and accusations. When Tom’s face appears (larger than life, no doubt) on the screen, it’s obvious that he’s not expecting to have his picture shown. His hair has gotten a bit scragggly and his beard has come in (though his moustache is neatly trimmed and groomed); the visage is familiar as someone else and yet as him simultaneously. He mumbles something about not being sure if the picture and sound are making it through or not. Then he flips open his cell phone and starts screaming into it; he’s tired of being the subject of so much constant scrutiny and beratement. The rant goes on for several minutes before he abruptly snaps shut his phone and the screen flickers out.
Everyone gathered in the pub looks ashamed, perhaps even feels a bit bad for him. What monsters have we become? Except that no one in this town seems to know exactly who this Tom Cruise person is. We value his privacy (as we would value everyone else’s) but why is he accusing us of violating it? I jump up onto a table and explain to everyone that they shouldn’t feel bad. We shouldn’t dwell on this petty, tempermental man’s problems. If we focus on them, we’ll become obsessed and his self-fulfilling prophecy will reveal itself as true.
It’s a nice day outside. So we all go out and play croquet and ultimate frisbee.
Thursday evening it seemed that we’d never get moved and then Friday everything sort of collapsed in on itself and we discovered that we had about 5 or 6 days to wrap everything up. (EEK!) That said, A. & I are now in a mad scramble to cross our various t’s and dot the various i’s to close the book on our [tag]Barre[/tag] chapter and get ourselves settled into [tag]Burlington[/tag]. It’s certainly not going to be a fun next couple of days as we make all of the various phone calls to turn off this and activate that and update the mailing address on the other thing… Unfortunately only about a quarter of the above can be done easily (read “online”) and heaven forbid you attempt to cancel any services without speaking to a human being who will no doubt interrogate and/or berate you for your decision. While I don’t necessarily expect that from (for example) my local, municipal water/sewer department, I must admit to dreading that call to Verizon.
The real pain in the neck has been trying to unload some of our “good but we don’t want it anymore” furniture. When you’re not armed with a truck, it’s difficult to move around these kinds of items. Thanks to JDS though, we got turned on to the Washington County [tag]Freecycle[/tag] list and have a couple of takers (apparently) on those items.
Anyway, this whole “move” business just so happens to fall square in the middle of what was planned to be one of my busiest weeks at work and so now not only is everything feeling “last minute” but “panicked” and “last minute”. Lucky for my A. has volunteered to handle many of the arrangements but there’s still too much for any one person to do. Seeing as how we’re about 60-70% packed at this stage (and have dumped all but three of the items we’ve been looking to dump), at least that part of the equation is in decent shape. Anyway, appearances here are expected to be scattered for the next week or so. Wish us luck!
It was about this time five years ago that A. & I got our knot tied…
And now:
Here’s to the many good times that have been and the many more to come.
<3
The [tag]Bagger 288[/tag]: I can hardly believe that such a thing exists:
It was built for the job of removing overburden prior to coalmining in Hambach, Germany. It can excavate 240,000 tons daily – the equivalent of a football field dug to 30 meters (98 ft) deep.
Stunning.
We meander through the museum and stop awhile in Gallery 238, which includes two paintings by Jackson Pollock. Galenson gestures toward the first, The Key, done in 1946, when Pollock was 34 years old. It looks like a child’s drawing – thick lines, crayony colors, underwhelming. “Pollock was a really bad artist at this point,” Galenson says.
Nearby is another Pollock, Greyed Rainbow, a large and explosive work done in 1953. It’s spectacular. Pollock was an experimental innovator who spent two decades tinkering, and this painting is a triumph of that process. To paint it, he laid the canvas on the floor, splattered it with paint, walked around it, tacked it to the wall, looked at it, put it back on the ground, splattered it with more paint, and so on. “This painting is full of innovations,” Galenson says, “but Pollock arrived here by trial and error. He was a slow developer.”
[...]
We walk back to The Key. “Look at this thing,” Galenson says. “It’s a piece of crap. If that weren’t by a famous artist, it wouldn’t be here.” [...] “If Pollock had died at 31, you never would have heard of him.”
[tag]VoodooPad[/tag] is up to 3.0. Still undecided it I’m going to upgrade just yet. There are now 3 tiers of the application and I’d lose the encryption unless I went “Pro” but man a tabbed interface and that PDF service are pretty sick looking… And man (OH MAN!) does that “[tag]linkback[/tag]” feature tickle me in all the right ways…
